I've written about insecurity among the young & how it's changing the way they see the world. "We're drowning in insecurity," says a new grad. “I sometimes have this feeling that we are edging towards a precipice, or falling in it already,” says another. ft.com/content/77d586…
Wealth amassed by older generations (see chart above) will of course flow down to younger ones. But that will exacerbate inequality between those with wealthy parents and those without. Young people feel this divide intensely.
Perhaps because of this, I found it fascinating to see how often young people who were doing well attributed their success to luck, rather than purely to their own merit & hard work.
Their deep sense of insecurity is also shaping how young people traverse the world of work (leading to some misunderstandings about "entitlement" IMO)
There's loads more in the piece about climate change, whether to have children, etc. It's based on a survey we opened (thanks @WarwickChing) for one week only for over 35s. An amazing 1,700 young people responded from everywhere from Cambodia to Norway. Reader, I read them all.
Next week the FT is running a series of editorials, with daily FREE 2pm BST online debates, calling for a new deal for the young. We're doing housing on Mon, pensions Tue, jobs Wed, education Thu, climate Fri and tax Sat. Do join us! newdeal.live.ft.com/page/1760891/r…
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Have you ever heard someone ask this Q about why Brits won't pick fruit and veg? @JudithREvans
& I have a story which sheds some light. It's about the experience of some Russians & Belarusians coming to pick UK fruit on a new visa pilot (Thread) ft.com/content/11e49a…
They expected hard work, long hours, and the minimum wage. But the problem the faced was the opposite of too much work: the ones we spoke to were being deprived of it for not meeting productivity targets.
They were on zero hour contracts, which do not guarantee any work. Here's a clause from one contract we saw.
Are Brits "too lazy" to do the jobs migrant workers do, like fruit picking? Are farmers "too unpatriotic" to hire them? No and no. Let's start by looking at how the job has changed since Brits used to do it. 1/n ft.com/content/eb5e3b…
Piece rates are still common, but min wage law means farmers must top up the pay of pickers whose productivity is too low. Supermarkets have exerted relentless pressure on price & quality standards. The result is has been a HUGE intensification of this job.
This paper by @rogaly at Uni of Sussex, written almost a decade ago, picked up on the changes by interviewing farmers sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gatewa…
Politicians: cherry-picking the best stats for your speeches doesn't persuade the public all is well, it persuades them they're being lied to ft.com/content/ac72d1… A worked example follows...
Philip Hammond's spring speech 2019 (the last "normal" speech of this kind, I think?) rattles off a string of wonderful stats about the "remarkably robust" economy. All are technically correct. But still...
Fastest wage growth - ok, at that moment, in nominal terms (see chart) but this is hardly the stat that matters most to people, which is real terms wage growth, which had been dire for a decade in 2019 (see chart).
Shame on me, given my job, but only since the pandemic have I really started to understand how threadbare the UK's safety net has become. Take statutory sick pay. The UK is now at the very bottom of all OECD countries. Even Trump's America is doing more.
There's a hard-headed reason to raise sick pay: that otherwise some people won't isolate because they can't afford to (the people reliant only on SSP are disproportionately in jobs that can't be done from home.) Skimping is a false economy.
To let unemployment surge under the cover of allowing the economy to adjust naturally to the "new normal" would be intellectually dishonest and economically dangerous. We won't know what jobs are viable post-Covid until we're actually post-Covid. ft.com/content/f3166a…
Meanwhile there aren't enough new jobs for people to "reallocate" into.
Boris Johnson promised us a New Deal in June, so how about taking a leaf from FDR and creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs? The UK economy clearly needs more care workers, nurses, teachers, teaching assistants & others to cope with the future anyway. kingsfund.org.uk/sites/default/…
The gig economy isn't the future of work after all. In fact, it might not have a future at all. ft.com/content/11e2e1…
Uber and Lyft say they'll have to raise prices by 20% to 120% in California if forced to treat drivers as employees. That's an indication of how much money they've been saving by ignoring the laws that apply to everyone else...
...but even with that labour cost compression, they're still loss-making, and the bigger they get the more money they lose. Their business model is to sell services for far less than their actual value. No wonder customers love them